Technology

  • Mensen op Mars. Een manmoedige poging, Joris van Casteren (ISBN 9789044628722, Prometheus)

    Mensen op Mars is het verhaal achter het Mars One project van 2 Nederlandse ingenieurs om tegen 2027 4 mensen op Mars te krijgen. Het was een non profit organisatie die als doel had de plannen voor een bemande Mars missie versneld te realiseren omdat de NASA en andere officiële ruimtevaart organisaties te weinig ambitie…

    Mensen op Mars. Een manmoedige poging, Joris van Casteren (ISBN 9789044628722, Prometheus)
  • Cheljabinsk-65. A nuclear accident waiting to happen again

    Cheljabinsk-65 is nowadays known as Mayak, one of the biggest nuclear complexes in the world. In 1957 a tank with nuclear waste exploded at Mayak, spreading nuclear materials for miles around. The Soviet government hushed up the accident. They also didn’t inform people living there that the facility was dumping radioactive waste water in the…

  • Birthday of Ray Dolby

    Ray Milton Dolby was born on January 18 1933. He was an American engineer and inventor of the Dolby NR noise reduction system and founded Dolby Laboratories. Today Dolby is everywhere with Dolby Surround, Dolby Atmos, Dolby HD and so on. The world of entertainment certainly sounds differently with Dolby.

  • Responsive Design

    My youngest started first grade this year and needs some tool to help him study so I decided to create a quiz app in a browser for him. So it was time for me to brush up on html, css and JS. I have some basic code in Javascript for randomly picking the questions and…

  • Interview with Richard Rhodes about The Making of the Atomic Bomb

    I was surfing the web for some information about the Oppenheimer movie and came across this interview with author Richard Rhodes on YouTube in May 2023. Really interesting to hear Rhodes talk about the many people he talked to in the course of writing this book and others. Well addition to reading the actual book.

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  • Mosaic

    Even though Netscape was the first really widespread browser it really started with Mosaic. Marc Andreessen was involved in both products. There is s a short Computing Conversations interview about the origins of Mosaic.

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  • Netscape

    If you are old enough you may remember Netscape and their browser that made the World Wide Web accessible for everyone. There is a nice documentary about these early beginnings of the www, Netscape and the ‘war’ between Microsoft to bring out the most popular web browser.

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  • Markdown Basics

    In my search for a good way to digitise my notes with equations I have come across Markdown as an option. Jupyter Notebooks support it so this may be a promising solution. It is another ‘language’ to learn but at least the basics not related to equations are extremely simple. Headings in Mardown start with…

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  • Think Different

    ‘Here’s to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holees. The ones who see things differently. They’re not fond of rules. And they have no respect for the status quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them. About the only thing you can’t…

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  • No more ICE

    I learned earlier this week from a colleague that ICE can also stand for Internal Combustion Engine. It was his own invention no doubt but he said he got a personalised number plate with ICE on it when he switched to an electric car. He had overlooked that ICE in the US also stands for…

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